Tuesday, January 22, 2008

For today's post, we're following in the footsteps of yesterday's activity, but moving on to scripting out system paging activity on a server. This script goes in a little bit of a different direction than the previous two, as we'll be charting out these values with bars. There are only so many wavy lines a guy can take ;)

This script was written on a Solaris box, and the output from "sar -g" on RedHat is distributed slightly differently (so the array elements I use to plot the Graph values in this script wouldn't give you precise results if you just ran this on Linux. They might be interesting, though ;). The script below is, again, written in Perl and will, run on SolarisUnix and RedHatLinux (Linux, again, with slight modification - but we'll definitely hit on that in a follow-up post when we've covered all 4 major bases).

This script is written to be run on the host it's measuring, since it runs sar at the time you invoke it, like so:

./sarpagegraph.pl

This Graph didn't turn out to look very visually striking, but the use of bars to represent triplicate y values seemed appropriate. Charts like these cause eyestrain, and resulting headaches, commensurate with the amount of sampled data crammed into the picture ;)

Again, click on the picture above to see it at its actual resolution :)